Stalingrad of the East – a battle to remember

“For having prevented a military debacle that would have finished the already declining British Raj, it beats Waterloo and D-Day in importance,” writes Mahendra Ved about the Battle of Kohima and Imphal.

“The Japanese concede it was their worst defeat,” he writes in an article for New Straits Times, while the protracted battle saw an English anthropologist become “the only woman guerilla commander in the history of the British Army.”

Yet “Indians have, by and large, forgotten it as a symbol of its colonial past.”